YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Explore everything from Yiddish language to literature, occult traditions, and archival interpretation through small courses offered in person and on Zoom.

Summer Semester

Beginner through advanced students gather in small classes this summer to strengthen spoken Yiddish, deepen reading skills, and engage directly with the literary and historical worlds of Ashkenazi culture.

Summer Semester

“'There are only a few authentic places in Europe where Jews hid that have been preserved ... But in those cases, the story is usually told from the perspective of the righteous — those who saved Jews.' In Bedzin, by contrast, the preserved hiding place was organized by Jews themselves.”

A secret bunker, tunnel and Star of David tell a story of Jewish resistance in a Polish town Evidence suggests up to 60 people hid there.

Otwock was at once a Jewish shtetl, a resort town, a center of Hasidic life, and a gathering place for writers and artists, and Benny Mer (Majersdorf) brings this remarkable prewar world back into view through literature, images, and history.

Part of the Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series. Delivered in Yiddish.

Welcome to Otwock: A Virtual Visit to the Warsaw Suburb Before the War

“Officially these kinds of materials are, at some level, considered unacceptable. Yet a lot of rabbis participate in this.”

Jewish psychics and wonder rabbis are the stars of a new museum exhibit - Jewish Telegraphic Agency YIVO spotlights fortune-tellers, mind-readers and clairvoyants, and the enduring appeal of the occult in moments of social anxiety.

NOW OPEN: From dybbuks and demons to the enduring presence of the evil eye, "Jews Are Magic" presents a world in which the boundaries between the natural and supernatural remained fluid and deeply intertwined.

Jews Are Magic: Occult Practices from Palmistry to Professional Psychics

"A handful of Jewish U.S. soldiers killed during World War I whose graves at the largest American military cemetery in Europe had been marked by crosses now have the Star of David as their headstone."

5 WWI soldiers receive Star of David headstones after century-long error Jewish U.S. soldiers killed in World War I and buried at Europe’s largest American military cemetery now have the Star of David on their headstones.

Rebekka Voß explores the unexpected forms of the literary afterlife of the Ten Lost Tribes in Yiddish and German traditions and how these stories illuminates broader questions of identity, belief, and cultural exchange.

Part of the Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series. Delivered in English.

The Red Jews: Intertextuality in a Yiddish Myth

“You don’t have to search for antisemitic content to find it on Instagram.”

Instagram algorithm steers users toward antisemitic content, watchdog says Researchers found that accounts engaging only with mainstream self-improvement content were quickly exposed to conspiracy theories and anti-Jewish narratives.

Zvi Gitelman explores the revolutions, world wars, civil conflict, state-sponsored transformation, cultural adaptation, and mass migration that shaped the lives of millions of Jews from the Russian Empire.

Part of the Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series. Delivered in English.

The Drama of Russian Jewry in the Long Twentieth Century